The statements in this section merely provide background information related to the present disclosure and do not necessarily constitute prior art.
In the present disclosure, term “smart phone” refers to a mobile device that provides one or more functions of personal computer (PC) and any other advanced functions, executes an open OS program that provides a standardized interface and platform for application developers. Examples “open OS program” include, but are not limited to, Android, iOS, Symbian OS, BlackBerry OS, Windows Phone, Bada, and the like.
With smart phones are popularized, a software market for free transactions of applications, having various functions and usable in the smart phones, between a developer and a user is activated and also its use is growing.
While this gives a positive aspect that a user can freely use a necessary application by downloading applications to the smart phone, this also invites a negative aspect that a malicious application such as a smishing application is spread and does harm to a user by being used for an illegal purpose such as collecting user's personal or financial information.
Particularly, a recently issued smishing application commits an illegal financial transaction such as micro payment or account transfer by snatching a message away from a user, such as a short message service (SMS) or a multimedia message service (MMS) transmitted for various financial transactions, sign-in, and the like.
Specifically, a smishing application has functions to send a spam message or a message for installing a malicious application to phone numbers stored in an address book of a certain terminal device, to install a malicious application in a terminal device of a user who opens the spam message or the above message for installing the malicious application, to snatch a message associated with user authentication or micro payment authentication and then send the snatched message to a designated address, and also to process such the snatched message to a spam message so as not to recognize micro payment processing.
The reason that such as smishing application is possible is as follows. When any downloaded application is registered, the open OS installed in the smart phone may set a priority and an option to receive a message for each application. Any received message is delivered sequentially to at least one application having the option to receive the message. At this time, an application having higher priority receives the message from the open OS and then may prevent the message from being delivered to any other application having lower priority.
Additionally, a currently used open OS may assign higher priority to an application developed by a third party and additionally installed in a terminal device in comparison with a message processing application basically offered by a manufacturer of the smart phone. However, the inventor(s) has noted that, if such an application having higher priority operates abnormally in some situations, a message is not received due to a response failure.
Therefore, the inventor(s) has noted that, a solution is needed for stably delivering a received message to a user in an environment that various applications developed using an application program interface (API) of the open OS by a third party other than a terminal device manufacturer can access the received message.